NEW DELHI: Stressing that the Ukraine conflict cannot be resolved on the battlefield, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Tuesday that Russia and Ukraine have to negotiate. If they want advice, India is always willing to give it. He also said India is not “closed to business from China”, but the question was “in which sectors… and on what terms”.

Jaishankar’s comments on the Ukraine war are a reiteration of what PM Narendra Modi said in Kyiv on August 23 — that India is willing to play “an active role” in the peace process between Russia and Ukraine — and came a day after Jaishankar held a “useful conversation” with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on the margins of the India-Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers’ meeting in Riyadh.

Responding to questions at the Annual Ambassadors’ Conference of the German Foreign Office in Berlin, Jaishankar said, “We don’t think this conflict is going to be resolved on the battlefield. At some stage, there’s going to be some negotiation. When there is a negotiation, the main parties — Russia and Ukraine — have to be at that negotiation.”

Recalling PM Modi’s visits to Russia and Ukraine, he said Modi has said in both countries that this was not an era of war. “We don’t think you’re going to get a solution out of the battlefield. We think you’ve got to negotiate… If you want advice, we are always willing to give it…,” he said, adding countries have differences, but conflicts are not a way to resolve them.

On China, he said: “We are not closed to business from China… It’s the second-largest economy in the world. It’s a premium manufacturer. So there’s nobody who can say, I won’t do business with China. I think the issue is, which sectors do you do business and on what terms? So, it’s far more complicated than a black and white binary answer.”

Meanwhile, Jaishankar called for greater cooperation with Germany in innovation, AI, fintech and green technologies.